Piss-broke nursing student, here.
The amount of reading I'm having to crank through on a weekly basis is pretty insane - I've been leaning heavily on text-to-speech software to knock the chapters out as fast as possible.
The best I've found so far - which isn't FOSS - is https://speechify.com/text-to-speech-online/ ...enough of it's free and accessible to get the job done, but it's got some pretty instrusive "buy me!" features built in, like if I'm listening to a large document and hit the pause button, I'm basically screwed because when I click play I get a prompt for "To continue listening, sign up for premium!"
Hoping to find better options if there are any, especially for ones that offer decent voice options. Some of them are impressively near-human sounding, while others sound like Microsoft Sam from like 1998; the quality and variety of voices make a big difference in retention for me (replaying a lecture with different voices is proving to be a pretty effective study habit).
More focused on the 'free' part vs the open source bit, but the latter would ofc be a good perk.
Know of any good options?
Thank you!!
Anyone know of a good/current breakdown of the available instances? I landed on LW during the reddit exodus, and so far I’ve been happy here - haven’t felt the itch to relapse back to reddit or the need to find a new home on the fed… even this piracy thing isn’t a deal breaker for me personally since I don’t really engage in that content anyway - but on principle I dislike that it’s been blocked.
Despite all that, I wouldn’t mind poking my head around just to see what’s up, and maybe find my nice little niche, but I don’t know the best way to actually go about navigating the fed.
Good resource for metrics! I’d really love some more qualitative information though - like by metrics alone, exploding.heads looks pretty decent; but I know just from hanging around here for the past month or so that it’s a hive of neonazis and definitely NOT somewhere I’d want to spend any time. Also info like which instances block / are blocked by the one in question; compatibility with mobile apps or quality of mobile website… shit like that. Would have been awesome to have a guide like that when I joined up as a brand-newbie; but even after having my feet in the water for a bit, I’m kinda lost on where to go from here.